Tell Me Not to Love You novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The First Loaf
On the first Saturday in December, at ten past four in the morning, I took the first loaf out of my own oven.
It came up on the peel, brown and split and singing as it cooled.
The shop smelled of rye and woodsmoke and new paint.
Over the door outside, in gold leaf the gardener had laid on himself over three evenings, it said FRONT DOOR BREAD.
I had signed the lease with my own thirty-eight thousand dollars and my own name, in front of nobody, on a Tuesday.
The flour in the bin came from Racine.
It came in cloth sacks from a stone mill with a leaking roof.
A man in a bad apron had been running that mill since the second of November.
"Is it done?" said the man in the bad apron.
"Don't touch it."
"I'm not touching it. I'm looking at it with respect."
Garrick stood at the end of my steel table, floury to the elbows, with his hair full of it.
He had burned four loaves that week and sworn at each one.
I had made him write the swearing on the wall in chalk.
I set the loaf on the rack and rapped the crust with my knuckle.
It rang hollow.
"Now," I said.
I tore the heel off and held it up, steaming.
He bit into it with his eyes closed.
I watched his face change, slowly, from a man being polite to a man who had forgotten his own name.
"Sol," he said, around the bread.
"Yes?"
"I'd like to apologize to every loaf I ever burned."
I laughed so hard I had to put my hand on the table.
He swallowed, and set the heel down, and looked at me across the steel.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Tell Me Not to Love You are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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